Virtues & Vocations is a national forum for scholars and practitioners across disciplines to consider how best to cultivate character in pre-professional and professional education. Virtues & Vocations hosts faculty workshops and monthly webinars, and engages issues of character, professional identity and moral purpose through our publications.
Upcoming Webinars
Education for Flourishing: Pursuing Purpose in the Professions
Karen Bohlin
Monday, March 20, 12-1pm
Karen Bohlin, educator and senior scholar at Boston University’s Center for Character and Social Responsibility, will discuss Educating for Character: Why Practical Wisdom Matters.
Dave Evans
Monday, April 17, 12-1pm
Dave Evans, co-founder of the Stanford Life Design Lab, co-founder of Electronic Arts and co-author of the #1 New York Times-bestselling book Designing Your Life will discuss how students and professionals can pursue purpose in their lives and work.
Nii Addy
Monday, May 22, 12-1pm
Nii Addy, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and of Cellular and Molecular Physiology and Director of Scientist Diversity and Inclusion at Yale School of Medicine, will discuss Mental Health & Human Flourishing.
Cover artwork: “The Blue Pond” by Clair Bremner © 2020
Virtues & Vocations: Higher Education for Human Flourishing is an open invitation to a conversation, a community, and a set of contested aspirations for both how we ought to live together in this world and how higher education might serve those aspirations. It is also animated by a highly contested, largely untested hypothesis that higher education can, in fact, promote human flourishing. In this magazine, when we talk about flourishing, we do so as Aristotle did, rooting it in the cultivation of character.
In August 2017, just a few days after a white supremacist mob marched on the University of Virginia, one of their most eminent and committed professors, Chad Wellmon, wrote a provocative piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Virtues and vocations are classical moral concepts that invite fresh ways to think about how the educational process can make a difference for the moral life of their students.
The formation of elites has always been an uncomfortable subject for Americans because we think the whole idea of elites somehow violates our democratic ethos. In a society of equals, it feels wrong to speak of how a leadership class should be fostered.
This Month's Newsletters
This month we launched a new magazine, Virtues & Vocations: Higher Education for Human Flourishing. Our newsletter featured Meghan Sullivan's lead article on "The Moral Function of the University," where she examines three different assumptions underlying the skeptical position that universities cannot cultivate virtue.
In From Strength to Strength, Arthur Brooks provides a blueprint for transitioning from the hurried, frenetic pace of early career to a flourishing, more serene latter half of life. At once practical and inspiring, Brooks advice requires readers to reflect on where they’ve been and where they hope to end up.
Is it possible to increase college students’ concern for the common good—and commitment to pursuing it—when they are faced with ethical dilemmas? Harvard’s Howard Gardner and Wendy Fischman attempted to do just that in their “Beyond the Self” pilot project, and are now helping faculty at institutions across the country adapt and implement the intervention on their campuses.
